Comments Elsewhere

William H. Stoddard: Nonetheless, I’m not sure what other short word there is to use for people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx.

Well. “Marxist”?

If you need something a bit broader in application, you might try “Marxian,” or, more broadly still, “State Socialist.”

Here’s my other favorite Calvin and Hobbes strip: GT 2006-04-16: Direct Action.

Holmes,

I don’t think you’re fixated on winning elections, and I can’t find anywhere that I made that claim. What I think you are fixated on trying to influence people through electoral means. But as I’ve already tried to explain at some length, electoral politics is structurally ill-suited to the kind of influence that you want to exercise. The message you’re trying to spread is fundamentally antagonistic to the very process you’re trying to use, and the dynamics of electoral campaigns are such that they tend to drum up a lot of noise and very little concrete progress.

As for the success of the Socialist Party’s domestic platform, I’m familiar with the story. But I think that its success depended much less on electoral pressure politics than it depended on shifts in the surrounding culture outside of the electoral arena. It is also had the advantage of a domestic platform which would enhance the power of the American political class rather than antagonizing and undermining that power. Any consistent form of libertarianism lacks the latter “advantage,” and so has a correspondingly much worse chance at any kind of uptake in political circles.

Holmes: Let me be clear, then: if the education doesn’t work, the practice is going to get crushed.

Any oppositional effort, including electoral politics, is going to “get crushed” if education and persuasion fail. But the relationship between practice and education depends on how you’re practicing, and whom you’re trying to educate and persuade. Unlike electoral politics, successful counter-economics doesn’t necessarily require a shift in the consensus among either politicians or mass political parties or 50%+1 of the tens of millions of voters. The opportunities for success on the margin in counter-economics are much greater, the number of people you have to convince to keep yourself and your friends safe is much lower, and the people that you’re aiming to educate and persuade are much less likely to have a pre-existing bias against individual freedom.

Me: You seem to be suggesting here that the only “political consensus” worth trying to sway is the consensus of incumbent politicians and political office-seekers.

Holmes: I suggested nothing of the sort.

As you like, but if you didn’t mean to so limit the “consensus” that you’re interested in shifting, then you’ve offered no argument in favor of adopting electoral strategies over counter-economics.

There are lots of ways to shift consensus outside of the coterie of incumbents and office-seekers, and I think there’s very little empirical evidence that electoral politics has much effect on that. Successful maverick politicians generally attract a groundswell of enthusiastic support, then their ideas are promptly quarantined and marginalized by appeals to electability, etc. After they (more or less inevitably) lose the general election, the enthusiasm dissipates, the ideas are more or less forgotten, and the organization bleeds down to a small hard core that already supported the ideas anyway. The enthusiasts who hopped on the bandwagon will find another maverick in the next election, often one with more or less contradictory ideas to the previous one. Cf. Ed Clark, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, etc. etc. etc.

Counter-economics, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on mass outreach, doesn’t depend on converting some significant chunk of a national constituency numbering in the tens or hundreds of millions, doesn’t operate on 2 or 4 year cycles, doesn’t suddenly splutter out after a single loss, doesn’t cost millions of dollars (indeed, is often profitable), and offers lots of opportunities for individual success on the margin.

As for overthrowing the State, that’s a secondary goal, and strategically a ways off. But that’s true for all theories that don’t involve a big helping of magical thinking. The primary goal is not to overthrow the State, but to widen the scope of your own individual freedom. That goal can be acted on immediately, through intelligent direct action, and to persuade your friends and neighbors to do likewise, or at least not to turn you in. Which I suspect is much easier to do than trying to influence either a sizeable chunk of the mass electorate, or the establishment politicians, towards libertarian policy or libertarian candidates. Especially when your vehicle for trying to do so is the Republican primary campaign of an anti-immigration Constitution crank.

Holmes,

The idea of “counter-economics” is something a bit broader than just “work off the books” and “participate in black markets.”

Part of the point of the counter-economic strategy is to shift the cultural consensus towards conscious opposition to State efforts to crush black markets. In Konkin’s theory, the proposed means are a combination of education and persuasion, organization, and direct practice, with different aspects phased in at different times.

You seem to be suggesting here that the only “political consensus” worth trying to sway is the consensus of incumbent politicians and political office-seekers. But that’s not at all true. And it’s a good thing that it’s not true, because there is absolutely no reason to expect that people who are already professional usurpers, or aspiring to become professional usurpers, are going to be very much interested in your arguments in favor of liberty.

Point of information.

As far as I know, Ron Paul has only said that he supports unrestricted access to emergency contraception, not to Mifepristone (RU-486).

Mifepristone is not what’s usually referred to as “the morning-after pill.” “Morning-after pills” are emergency contraceptives such as Plan B or Preven, which use high doses of hormonal contraceptives to prevent ovulation or implantation if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. (You can get about the same effect by taking several doses of a regular oral contraceptive at once.) EC pills only prevent pregnancies from beginning; they cannot abort one once it has begun.

Mifepristone, on the other hand, is a chemical abortifacient that can be used to terminate a pregnancy during the first two months.

As an Ob/Gyn, Ron Paul would be acquainted with the differences, so I expect that he considers EC drugs to be morally no different from traditional oral contraceptives, which work the same way. (Some of the antis believe that hormonal contraceptives and EC are equivalent to abortifacients, at least for purposes of faith and morals, but lots don’t. I expect Paul is one of the latter.)

As for his current views, his website currently offers the following. I take it that the presence on his campaign website indicates that this still reflects his beliefs.

… In Congress, I have authored legislation that seeks to define life as beginning at conception, HR 1094.

…As an OB/GYN doctor, I’ve delivered over 4,000 babies. That experience has made me an unshakable foe of abortion.

… Many talk about being pro-life. I have taken direct action to restore protection for the unborn.

One such action, which his issues page doesn’t mention, was to vote in favor of the recent federal procedure ban on so-called “partial-birth abortion.” An unfortunate lapse from his putatively federalist position.

Fun fact: my grandfather actually knew Ron Paul decades ago through the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and through politicking within the Texas Medical Association. Granddad had Paul over to his house for several conversations about libertarian ideas, and introduced him to the notion that the government medical licensing should be abolished, which Paul found to be quite shocking at first. He also tried to convince Paul that abortion should be decriminalized. Fortunately, in time, he managed to win Paul over to the former idea. Unfortunately, he failed to win him over to the latter.

Thanks for the post, and for the link. (Both to Rad Geek People’s Daily and to the essay I co-authored with Roderick Long.) Hope you enjoy the blog!

Kai: I’m very excited, folks. Feels like Christmas! (A male libertarian feminist is great, but I’d really love to find some female ones, too.)

Have you read any of Carol Moore’s stuff? These days most of her writing and activism is concentrated on the anti-war movement but she is also a committed feminist and has written some excellent pieces on libertarian feminism: Woman vs. the Nation State, How Violent Males Co-opt Woman-Initiated Nonviolent Movements, The Return of Street Fighting Man: The Pathology of the New Progressive Violence, etc.

N.B.: I haven’t started producing PDFs of the documents that I put on Fair Use, but I hope to one day. For those who are both impatient and savvy about DocBook and XSLT, the DocBook XML source is already available online, at http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/instead-of-a-book.book

I’d do it myself, but I’m a stickler about formatting, and am currently working on other projects. But if anyone produces a good-looking PDF from the DocBook source, I’d be glad to get a copy of that to post at fair-use.org. The person who generated it would get credit, of course.

Echidne, I’m familiar with the theory of perfect competition. When I say “free markets,” I don’t mean markets in a state of perfect competition. A free market is a condition that can exist in reality; a perfectly competitive market is an idealized model that cannot. If you’re familiar with Austrian theories of entrepreneurship — a la Israel Kirzner — then that may help explain why I don’t hang that much on theories of perfect competition. Economically, I’m far more interested in the dynamic processes by which real-life markets move towards equilibrium than I am interested in behavior of fictional markets that have reached that idealized state.

So I don’t think the question “Would a free market in X lead to better results than government intervention?” should be answered by appeal to whether or not the market in X will be perfectly competitive. No markets ever are. The question should be whether real people’s efforts to muddle through, facing an uncertain future, are going to be most productive when their arrangements about X are voluntary, or when they are constrained by government coercion.

In real-world markets, some externalities need to be internalized and others do not. When they do, there are lots of ways to do this that are consistent with a free market. One way is to change your business model; radio broadcasters provide a non-rivalrous, non-excludable service to their listeners, gratis, but they make money by using that service to provide a rivalrous and exludable service to advertisers. Private lighthouse operators in 19th century England made their money by charging the nearby port merchants rather than the passing ships. When the externalities are significant and negative, one way to address it is to recognize it as a property rights issue; which is why many radical free marketeers (not Chicago privateers) favor restoring a robust version of nuisance tort law in order to address issues like air pollution.

As for barriers to entry, they are certainly a real issue, but natural barriers to entry are far less common than is often suggested. As a rule, government regimentation of markets creates far higher barriers to entry than would exist under a free market, because compliance with the bureaucracy takes a lot of time, money, and lawyers, and because incumbents can often capture agencies and effectively use them to stifle competition.

The Leftist historian Gabriel Kolko has a very good book, called The Triumph of Conservatism, which discusses the ways in which the Progressive Era regulatory state created and sustained robber baron capitalism, more or less at the behest of Morgan, Rockefeller, and the rest, which reversed the previous decades’ progress towards smaller, decentralized outfits. Without government intervention, free markets very often exert a centrifugal force; they usually start concentrating wealth only once the kleptocrats step in and force competitors out of the market.

Anyway, it does seem to me that all this is well within the realm of economic theorizing, so it seems to me that the concept of a “free market” has got a meaningful role in economic theory. Even if the meaning of the term is often perverted or concealed by hypocritical plutocrats who claim to be acting in its name.

swampcracker, I’m glad that your volunteer emergency services provided so well for your town’s needs. I am all for that kind of face-to-face mutual aid. But I don’t see what it has to do with Firebreak or with my comments.

Firebreak is not a public service. It is a private service operated by insurance companies, mostly because those companies can protect expensive houses for less than it would cost to rebuild them.

They are providing a benefit over and above what is provided by the government and the volunteer services. They are not stopping the government from providing similar services to everybody. They are not stopping you or your fellow citizens from volunteering your own money or labor to provide similar services to everybody. If you think that the level of fire protection available through government and volunteer services is inadequate, then that’s a damn shame, and you ought to try to do something about it. But it does not mean that there is anything wrong with Firebreak for continuing to provide the higher level of service to those who pay them to do so.

If your rich neighbor decides to hire some bodyguards, do you expect them to protect you, too, for free?

Fair enough, but then why describe the observation as “Stealth Marxism”? It’s not a distinctively Marxist claim; it’s an observation that anyone watching the show could have come up with, given a passing familiarity with recent American history.

At worst it seems like an example of “stealth banality,” or, perhaps just “observations on topics outside my interests.”